Clive: Call me the new Jardine

When Clive Woodward last departed Australian shores with his all- conquering rugby team a couple of months ago, one correspondent bade farewell by wondering when England had last been represented there by a man "so utterly obsessed with inflicting defeat on Australia and one so utterly delighted to have done so".

The writer could only come up with one name: Douglas Jardine. This, you gather, quite tickles Woodward. Flying back there with his warriors today, this time charged with getting under Aussie thick skin even more painfully by wrenching their World Cup off them, someone as personable as the England coach figured he must have done something right if he was being likened to the ultimate Pom hate figure Jardine, the arrogant and patrician cricket captain who orchestrated 'Bodyline'.

"I saw it as a bit of a compliment. We obviously touched a few nerves down there," chuckled Woodward.

"Nothing really changes, I don't think the English are popular and we're still going to be the team that nobody else in rugby wants to see win, the team everyone is going to take most pleasure in beating. But we thrive on that," explained Woodward in an exclusive interview with Standard Sport as the team prepared to leave for Australia.

"I lived in Australia for five years, my first two kids were born there, I have no hang-ups about the place and, on the quiet, I think they quite like the English. But not when it comes to sport. It's a brutal business and they desperately want to beat us.

"I remember when I first started in the job, I thought I'll change all these negative attitudes towards us but I realised soon that was bulls***, that you're never going to, you just have to feed off them."

That's Woodward, the perfectionist always looking for the smallest thing that might provide an edge in the next challenge. It was a reminder that it wasn't just the players who gave incredible performances in Wellington and Melbourne but their coach, too.

The locals never knew quite what to make of Woody. Some days he was charming, sometimes he'd launch into what seemed an unnecessarily stinging attack on his Australian counterpart, Eddie Jones. At the eve-of-match press conference in Melbourne, Woodward just barked at everyone.

His hosts were so infuriated they suggested he was arrogant and ungracious. Perhaps he was just playing games to keep his opposition on the back foot? "Nah, I'm not clever enough to play games. I just like to be myself, to say what I feel," he grinned.

Well, it's true that one of Woodward's most attractive qualities is his heart-on-sleeve openness, whether it be his histrionics in the stands or eccentricity in the press room, yet he appears to have become very adept at the psychological warfare bit, too.

"Yes, I enjoyed throwing a few hand grenades and watching the reaction," he admitted, looking back at the summer tour.

It's easy to do when you can trust your soldiers to back up the words with sterling deeds. No wonder Woodward could sound like a confident and proud general on the eve of the team's departure, as he hailed his squad as "incredibly special people".

"I don't believe any team could have worked harder to be successful," he said. This blinkered intensity has also produced such a mould-breaking outfit that, perhaps for the first time since '66 and all that, a nation doesn't just hope but expects to see an England team lift a World Cup. Woodward welcomes it. "But this group of players are very close and the pressure not to let one of your colleagues down is huge, much greater than any expectations from the country."

Yet the job, he said, would only truly start when they had landed in Australia. "Everything has to be done better now; the training, the team meetings, the intensity, everything. Every one of us, players or management, have to perform better than we've ever done.

"I trust the players implicitly. If you have one person who's not quite there, that's where you are going to lose, but they all operate so professionally, so exceptionally that they don't want to let each other down.

"I promise you it's not the perfect environment, not sweetness and light all the time. It all kicks off at times as you'd expect in a competitive environment.

"The biggest thing for me is that I can say what I like with them and know I won't read about it in the newspapers the next day."

One senses that both Woodward and his players are as hardened as they will ever be to beat the world. When they were sent packing in the 1999 quarter-finals, Woodward copped fearful stick for having supposedly said 'judge me on the World Cup'. He insists he never actually said that.

Yet he also never thought of walking away under the barrage of criticism. "It was never a case of 'I don't need this.' The reason I'd taken the job was my passionate belief that England had the ability and potential to be the best in the world, but two years was nowhere near long enough."

In the four years since, they have made it to the top of the world, but winning the World Cup is a different matter. All the pain-inducing groundwork may have produced the best-prepared professional team to have left these shores, yet Woodward shrugs that "it'll all come tumbling down again" with one momentary lapse.

"But there's no fear, just excitement. I'm comfortable with the tag of favourite and we've got a team which plays well under pressure now. Yet if it's not to be, it's not to be. The main thing is that, win or lose, we have to go and savour the whole experience."